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Minecraft snapshot 14w03b reconnects disembodied heads with their owners

Minecraft snapshot 14w03a is all about the bugfixes.

CRACK! There goes the noise of distant splitting atoms at Mojang HQ, and – wait for it – BANG! The sound of Jeb’s release gun being fired into the air. Another snapshot is upon us, and – oh. It looks like it’s built entirely of things designed to fix the major features of last week’s snapshots. But that’s what the checkbox warning us off Minecraft’s test version is for, isn’t it? There’s a price to pay for demanding everything early, and this is it. On with the rundown.

Last week, players noticed that custom head textures seemed to be overstepping their remit – replacing Steve’s body textures with absolutely nothing at all, so that their skulls appeared to travel about unsupported five or six feet above the ground. Thankfully, Mojang have put an end to that disturbing trend.

Similarly, players reported on Thursday that windows were no longer transparent – instead, they’d become pale white sheets to block their view of the sunset (and later, the spiders). The issue had also affected iron blocks and cauldrons, which no longer possessed the polished sheen their owners had become accustomed to. Now, though, it’s fixed.

Other bugs had seen clay pots crash the game when placed, Minecraft Realms player skins “mess up”, and – most sinister of all – characters lose hats upon death. Jeb and team have seen off all of that, and added a couple of new copy-paste commands to make the business of mapmaking a little faster.

As always, snapshots are accessible through the ‘New Profile’ button of your Minecraft launcher. Name the profile ‘snapshots’ and tick the fateful box marked ‘Enable experimental development snapshots’. You can switch back to the vanilla version of the game at any time via the launcher’s dropdown menu.

Have any of you lot suffered any of these colourful bugs? Or do you tend to stick to safe, decimal place Minecraft? Some of the upcoming features our Duncan’s featured in Minecrafting include stone crafting, trading XP, and villager breeding – all of which are arguably worth the odd clay pot crash.